I wonder if the baby was born prematurely, and was very small. Here’s what Ladies Home Journal had to say in 1914 about the characteristics of “normal” babies:

The Normal Baby

Every mother is anxious for a normal baby, but many mothers, do not know just what a normal baby should be like. Variations are always found in every human being, but the following measurements given by Dr. L.E. Holt in his large book, “Diseases of Infancy and Childhood,” are now taken as the standard for the normal baby.

The weights are taken without any clothing. The height is taken by placing the baby on a perfectly flat surface like a table, and having some one hold the child’s knee down so that he lies out straight, then taking a tape-measure and measuring from the top of his head to the bottom of his foot, holding the tape line absolutely straight.

The chest is measured by means of a tape line passed directly over the nipples around the child’s body and midway between full inspiration and full expiration. The head measurement is taken directly around the circumference of the head, over the forehead and occipital bone.

Some other points of interest in the development of the normal baby are the following: head held erect if trunk is supported during the fourth month. Sit alone for a few minutes about seven months of age. In the ninth or the tenth month the baby will usually attempt to bear his weight on his feet. When ten or eleven months old he often stands alone with slight help. Makes first attempt to walk at twelve or thirteen months. The baby must not be urged to do any of these things; let him alone to develop naturally.

The teeth are always of interest; here is the way the average normal baby cuts his first set of teeth: Two lower central incisors, 6 to 9 months; four upper incisors, 8 to 12 months; four canines, 18 to 24 months; four posterior molars, 24 to 30 months.

At 1 year a child should have 6 teeth; at 1 1/2 years, 12 teeth; at 2 years, 16 teeth; at 2 1/2 years, 20 teeth.

The “soft spot” on fontanel on top of the head closes with the average normal baby at eighteen months, but often varies greatly.

10/13 – 10/17: Nothing worth writing about for these days. Don’t go any place or do anything of much importance.

Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:

Some days are just like that—they barely seem worthwhile. Today I hear so many recent college graduates worrying about whether it was worthwhile getting a college degree since the job market is so tight.

Was a college degree worth more a hundred years ago than it is now?

1913

According to a 1913 book called Rural Arithmetic by John E. Calfee:

A business man who has studied the productive power of intelligent labor in New York reports that the man with a common-school education is able to produce one and one-half times as much wealth as the illiterate man, the high-school man two times as much, and the college man four times as much.

The average dropout can expect to earn an annual income of $20,241, according to the US Census Bureau. That’s a full $10,386 less than the typical high school graduate, and $36,424 less than someone with a bachelor’s degree.

Comparison

There’s more of an income benefit of earning a high school diploma today than back then—and the value of getting a college has also increased slightly.

In other words, today someone with a high school diploma earns on average 1.5 times as much as a high school graduate and someone with a college degree earns 2.8 times as much.

This can be compared to 1913 when (after the base was converted to 1 for a high school dropout), a high school graduate on average earned 1.3 times as much as the dropout, and the college graduate earned 2.7 times as much as the dropout.

For those who care about the details–

I assumed that the benefit of a college degree didn’t change much between 2012 and 2013. The data I used was from a 2012 article.

Rural Arithmetic is a math textbook. A subheading in one of the chapters was “Educated Labor”. The quote above was pulled from the introduction to that subsection. It was followed by a series of word problems about the value of education.

The 1913 book used the term “common school graduate” to refer to someone who had completed 8 years of education. For the purposes of this analysis I considered a common school graduate to be a high school dropout.

And, here is a chart that contains a crosswalk between the base (salary of illiterate person=1) used in the 1913 book, and the base (salary of a high school dropout = 1) that I used in the chart at the top of this post.

An aside–We must be doing something right with education today since we no longer even think about what the salary would be for an illiterate person.

Did you ever wonder if people died from different causes a hundred years ago than what they do today? Since Grandma didn’t write much a hundred years ago today, I’ll share an interesting article I found in the June 16, 1913 issue of the Milton Evening Standard.

Births Exceed Deaths in State During March

Births in Pennsylvania during March numbers 18,945, but to offset this increase in population the deaths numbered 11,000, the ratio of deaths to births being higher than the average.

Pneumonia, which always exacts heavy toll during the winter, caused 1,721 deaths in March. The deaths were distributed among the various diseases and other causes about as usual.

Following are the figures compiled by the bureau of vital statistics of the state department of health:

Went to Sunday school this afternoon. Took my time a getting home. I heard some of the best speaking I have ever listened to this evening. A converted Jew talked about some of the customs of the Jewish people in the Reformed Church at McEwensville.

Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:

Grandma’ diary entry made me wonder: What percentage of the US population were considered members of the various religions in 1913 and 2013?

I discovered that this was a much more difficult question to answer than I thought it would be. The data on religious affiliations were collected very differently in the early 1900s than how it is gathered now—so when the data are compiled to do a comparison, it’s kind of like comparing apples to oranges.

This gets complicated, but let me try to explain what I did to create the figure above:

In the early 1900s , the US Bureau of the Census conducted a religious census every ten years. Religious leaders were asked how many members their congregation had; whereas in recent years, various non-profit organizations have conducted surveys where they asked a sample of the population about their religious preferences. As a result of these differences in methodology many more people were considered to have no religious affiliation a hundred years ago than now.

Calculation of 1913 Percentages

For the figure above, I used data from an article titled “U.S. has 42,043,374 Members of Church, New Census Shows” in the May 2, 1918 issue of the Minneapolis Morning Tribune. According to the article:

The term ‘members’ has a wide variety of uses. In most Protestant bodies it is limited to communicants or confirmed members; in the Roman Catholic, Eastern, and some other churches it includes all baptized persons, while in some bodies it covers enrolled persons.

The membership for the Jewish congregations requires some explanation. Some congregations reported as members all who contribute to the treasury of the congregation and not infrequently included women and children. The more orthodox, of the other hand, reported only those males who have incorporated the institution or have bought share or membership in it, but do not recognize as members other persons who are regular attendees or even contributors.

For the figure, I used data from the 1916 Religious Census, as reported in the Minneapolis Morning Tribune article, since this was the one done closest to a hundred years ago. To calculate the percentages I used the US population estimate for 1916 as reported by the US Bureau of the Census. I assumed that the percentage of the population who were members of various religions did not change much between 1913 and 1916 when creating the figure.

Calculation of the 2013 Percentages

For the 2013 percentages, I used data from a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center. Phone interviews were used to survey a sample of the US population. Respondents were asked which religion they identified with.

The survey was conducted in July, 2012—and I assume that the percentages have not changed significantly since then.

Monthly Poem

On the first of each month Grandma included a poem in the diary. For more information about the poems, see a previous post:

Since Grandma didn’t have much to say a hundred years ago today, I’m going to follow-up on some comments I got several days ago—

On May 10, I did a post about whether Grandma’s name was really Helena or Helen. The post got lots of comments—and several people mentioned that their grandmother’s or great-grandmother’s name also was Helena or Helen.

This got me thinking about popular baby names in 1913—and popular names a hundred years later in 2013.

According the Baby Center website, none of the ten most popular baby names in 1913 were in the top ten in 2013.

Since Grandma didn’t write much a hundred years ago today, I’ll go off on another tangent–

I’ve been reading some Edith Wharton books from the early 20th century—and one of the themes in her writing is unhappy marriages and the role of divorce. This made me wonder if divorce rates have changed much across the years.

The divorce rate was 0.9 per thousand population in 1913. It peaked at 4.6 in 1993; and decreased to 3.6 in 2013.

For those of you who care about the source of the data–The historic data is from Infoplease, and the data for the current year is from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If data for the exact year were not available, I used data from the nearest available year (typically the first year of the decade–for example, I used 1910 data for 1913).

Here are links to some previous posts on statistics that you might enjoy: